From the cheap seats

Mental stimulation knows few bounds when administrators, big wigs, pundits and other blowhards have Very Big Ideas about sport. In 2015, there were some epics. Let's recapitulate just a few of the high points.

It was no less big a wig than Australia's consul-general in New York, Nick Minchin, who in mid-November dropped his wrench into the delicate machinery of world sport at what was described in a Fairfax report as "a high-powered gathering of sport, business and media figures in Manhattan".

"Certainly the experience of Adelaide last year is anything to go by - 124,000 people over the course of three days - the fans are voting with their feet on that front": James Sutherland. Photo: Getty Images

(Whether they were all plugged into mains electricity or the Incredible Hulk and Superman had shown up for crackers and cheese-dip was not further specified.)

Consul-General Nick's Very Big Idea was that New York City would be a jim-dandy place to hold an International Rules test. You know, the ones between Australia and Ireland, that aren't either Gaelic football or Australian Rules.

In a way, it's a concept that's hard to argue against, in the sense that the Irish hardly seem to care about these games anymore, and the entire Australian nation sleeps soundly through the whole thing – i.e. why not New York?

Of course, a strikingly similar argument could be advanced – with similar validity – in favour of beautiful downtown Vilnius in Lithuania, or Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada.

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The notion that the United States constituted a massive and lucrative sporting market – and the slightly less convincing notion that all seeds planted there must necessarily yield mighty dollar-sprouting oaks – also seemed to lurk around another of sport's big ideas for 2015.

This concerned the late-blooming stampede to hold a Twenty20 cricket world cup in the United States "within ten years". The enthusiast quoted in a NewsCorp report this time was the International Cricket Council head of global development, Tim Anderson, who one gathers is a "big picture" type of guy.

Mr Anderson was joined by media commentators in citing that FIFA had had a lot of success with holding its World Cup right there in USA-ville.

The giant woolly mammoth in the room that amazingly went unmentioned in these instances was that the United States has a soccer team that may not be loading up the trophy cases with World Cups, but can compete at world level. As opposed to cricket, where (a) it doesn't, and (b) nobody cares.

They can cite a magical figure of 10.5 million cricket fans till the cows either come home or gain ICC affiliate member status, but that still leaves over 310 million Americans who probably think cricket is either a noisy insect or a member of Buddy Holly's old backing band.

Of 2015's other very big ideas, it is too early to call on day/night Tests and Thursday night AFL.

However, Cricket Australia's James Sutherland advancing the cause of beach cricket as an Olympic sport arguably had a certain force of comic propulsion behind it. "Beach cricket is not a silly idea," he commented.

Replace the words "Beach cricket" in that sentence with, say, "Forming a human pyramid", and you may glimpse the counter.